SHE PAUSES IN THE DOORWAY of her mother’s studio, trying once again to account for the changes. From her childhood she’s preserved a mental picture of several antique lamps, an interwoven jungle of spidery hanging plants and lithe potted palms, and a large, overstuffed reading chair with a slipcover of green velvet worn in spots like a favorite pair of old jeans. Here, however, is spare, industrial efficiency, enforced geometry, and highly focused halogen lighting. The lack of soul is general. Only the original drafting table remains, as if to say This one last thing will I still honor. Everywhere else, hard new metal has replaced old soft wood. This room that for years was the last haven for her mother’s dreaming and private moments, for curling up with the contents of her head or the hand-drawn plates of some nineteenth-century monograph on shrubs, today more accurately resembles a diamond cutter’s workroom, a temple of purposeful precision.
A second table, metal, is set up for an iMac with a twenty-four-inch monitor and a color laser printer. The only chair is a modernist Swiss thing that looks about as comfortable as a park bench. And what plants remain are sharp-edged and sculptural, cactus eye candy, lovely enough as long as you don’t try to touch them.
Bent over a drawing, hard at work, Grace Learner is oblivious of her daughter’s cataloguing presence. A welder’s beam of halogen light spills off her blond head and into the shadowy corner of the room.
Emma takes another step. A floorboard creaks, and her mother raises her head sharply.
“Sorry. Just coming in to say good night.”
“You’re going out?”
The gaze focuses rapidly, taking in the glove-tight jeans and sexy stretch top, then jumps to the digital clock on the computer table.
“It’s getting pretty late.”
“Now was the only time Paula could get free.” The lie pops out of Emma’s mouth so easily it leaves no trace on her tongue. “Oh. How is Paula? Still with that awful boyfriend?”
“That was a couple of years ago.”
“Where are you meeting her?”
“Is that a new project you’re working on?”
An obvious diversionary tactic; yet depressingly, as foreseen, her mother can’t help warming to this rare interest in her work.
“It’s for Sue Foley. She says she’ll have me redesign their entire four acres if I can come up with something that will persuade her husband.” Her mother pauses to realign the tracing paper she’s been working on. “The job would mean a lot.” A tentative half smile squeezes out. “Well, it would be great.”
“I hope you get it.” Emma means this—but at the same time, physically, she has begun drifting backward.
“Em?”
Halfway out of the room, she gets reeled back. And here is her mother at the canted table, face outwardly composed but blinking now in familial Morse code a haggard SOS: Don’t. Leave. Yet.
“You’ll be careful? End-of-the-holiday weekend. You know how wild people get.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
The empty, formal phrases trotted back and forth; no end, seemingly, to how many times they can be recycled, or how much erosion they can cause over time.
Then, out of nowhere, her mother takes a deep, complicated breath. “I ran into Wanda Shoemaker at the supermarket this afternoon.”
Emma doesn’t want to be rude exactly, but her foot has begun to tap against the floor. She’s already late. Sam might leave before she gets there. She might never see him at all.
“Who’s Wanda Shoemaker?”
“The woman living with Norris Wheldon. Probably going to marry him, I’ve heard.”
“Sam Arno’s stepfather?” Suddenly, Emma is listening with both ears instead of just one.
“Wanda told me news that just knocked the breath right out of me.”
“What news?”
“It seems that a few weeks ago, just before he was supposed to graduate, Sam Arno got into a fight with another UConn student at an off-campus bar.”
“So?” Emma’s tone—by design or accident, she doesn’t know which—emerges almost cavalier. Like: Guys in bars get in fights all the time. But look closer and you’ll see that her foot has stopped tapping. She takes a step farther into the room and remains there, taut and waiting.
“So—” repeats her mother with sudden irritation, as though it’s now incumbent on her to make an obvious and unforgivable point. “So the boy he beat up is still in the ICU in Hartford. And from what Wanda told me he may not pull through. He may die, Em. And Sam Arno may well end up going to prison like his fucking father.”
The room goes quiet; the word fucking seems to linger like a crude aftertaste. Behind its invisible, altering presence it’s possible to hear the tree limbs shifting in the breeze in the front yard. Emma’s face feels cold, stamped on like a sheet of tin.
Her mother is staring at her fiercely. “Did you hear a single thing I just told you?”
Nodding, Emma turns and walks out of the room. She flees the house. She drives to Canaan as fast and recklessly as she can, in her safety-first Swedish car that doesn’t know the meaning of recklessness.